Privacy

Karuta works without an account: if you do not sign in, your decks and your progress stay on the phone and no personal data leaves the device.

If you do sign in, an account and a copy of your data in the cloud are needed to find them again elsewhere and for the community side. The website and workspace use only strictly necessary cookies and local storage, so no banner is needed. There is no advertising, no profiling, and data is never sold or handed to third parties for commercial purposes.

The data controller is Riccardo Senes, a private individual resident in Italy. Karuta is an individual project: there is no company behind it, and the controller is the person who writes it.

For any request about your data you can write to support.karuta@gmail.com.

Only what is needed to run the things you asked for. In detail:

• Account. Sign-in is with Google. Karuta receives an identifier and the associated email address, and never has your password. If you buy Premium, it also stores the subscription status (level and expiry), but not payment details.
• Public profile. Username, display name, biography and avatar, if you fill them in. The avatar is not a photograph: it is a text description of a drawn face, generated on the device.
• Published content. The decks you choose to publish, their cards, and any images. They are public by definition, together with the username of the publisher. If you use an artificial-intelligence tool to write them, you remain responsible for what you publish: check that it is correct and that you have the right to share it.
• Your connections. Who you follow, who follows you, and pending follow requests.
• Community activity. Votes, favourites and reports you send.
• Study summary. Streak, cards reviewed, days studied and retention. They feed the challenge feature and are visible only to people who have an accepted follow with you, in either direction.
• Study data and saved words. Reviews, progress, statistics and the words you save with the browser extension. Study data lives on the device and, if you are signed in, is synced; saved words stay private in your inbox until you put them into a published deck.
• Notifications. If you enable them, a token from the device or browser issued by Google is stored to deliver the notification. It identifies the installation, not you, and is removed when you sign out or disable them.
• Anything you write to us. If you use Settings, Leave feedback, the app opens your own mail program with a message already filled in, including the app version and device model. Sending it is your decision: the app sends nothing by itself.
• Diagnostics. When something crashes the app sends a technical report: device model, system version and the error trace. Sending personal data is switched off in the configuration.

• No location, no contacts, no microphone, no camera. Photo access is requested only if you choose to put an image on a card, one file at a time, and you can refuse.
• No advertising networks, no advertising identifiers, no analytics or tracking across apps or websites. The browser extension does not read pages automatically: it reads only when you select a word and choose to save it, and it does not record the pages you visit.
• No payment details. Card numbers and billing data never pass through Karuta: Google Play handles them. Karuta only receives confirmation that the subscription is active.

• Account, profile, published decks, synced data, saved words, extension keys and subscription status: Supabase (Central EU (Frankfurt)).
• Card images: Cloudflare R2 (Western Europe). The archive is read from a public address, so anyone with an image address sees it, even if the card is not published. The address contains random identifiers and cannot be guessed, but do not upload images showing other people without their consent.
• Crash reports: Sentry, in Germany.
• Website, workspace, technical request logs (including IP addresses) and browser push notifications: Cloudflare and Google/Firebase Cloud Messaging. Google sign-in, app notifications, purchases and billing: Google, under its own policies. Your browser may sync the extension key through your account. The public site karuta.me sets no session cookies; on app.karuta.me we use only technical cookies: Supabase session, karuta-lang (one year), karuta-auth-next (ten minutes) and local storage for preferences and browser notifications. You can clear them in your browser settings.

Account data stays while the account exists. When you delete it, the profile, decks, progress, published content, followers, notifications, saved words and extension keys are removed. Images uploaded to cards are removed from the archive; if a technical cleanup fails, they may remain for the time needed to retry it and in any case no longer than thirty days. Signing out is different: it removes the session from the device, but the data in the cloud stays where it is.

Three practical exceptions remain: decks somebody else has already imported carry on living on their device, because at that point they are their copy; crash reports, which contain no personal data, follow Sentry's own retention; and moderation records may be kept for as long as it takes to keep the community clean.

You can ask to access your data, correct it, delete it, or receive a copy. Two of those you can do yourself, right now, from the app or the website:

• Deletion: in the app from Settings, Danger zone, Delete account; on the website from the account settings. It is immediate: it deletes cloud data, saved words, extension keys and the local copy; images uploaded to cards are removed from the archive within thirty days at the latest.
• A copy of your data: Settings, Export all decks. You get your content in a file.

For anything else, including a full copy of your data, write to support.karuta@gmail.com. We answer within one month of the request, extendable by two months in complex cases with notice. If you think your data is being processed incorrectly, you can also lodge a complaint with the privacy authority in your country: in Italy it is the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, https://www.garanteprivacy.it/.

Karuta is not intended for children and does not knowingly collect data from anyone under fourteen. Creating an account and using the community requires a minimum age of fourteen. If you find that a child under fourteen has given us data, write to support.karuta@gmail.com and we will delete it.

All network traffic runs over encrypted connections. In the app, session credentials live in the device's secure storage; on the website and workspace they live in technical session cookies, which the browser sends only over encrypted connections.

No system is a hundred per cent secure, and anyone claiming otherwise is overstating it. Reasonable measures are taken, and that is what can honestly be promised.

Some providers belong to groups based in the United States or may process data on servers outside the European Union: Cloudflare, Google, Firebase and Sentry's parent company also operate outside the EU. Transfers rely on the EU-US adequacy decision for companies adhering to the Data Privacy Framework or, alternatively, on the standard contractual clauses of the European Commission included in their data processing agreements. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards by writing to support.karuta@gmail.com.

The extension "Karuta – save words" does not read the pages you visit. It reads only when you select a word and choose "Save to Karuta": at that moment it sends Karuta the word, the sentence around it, the page title, the full page address, the page language and the language you are studying.

These data are used only to show the word in your "Saved words" inbox and to turn it into a card. They are not used for advertising, profiling or analytics, are not sold, and are private: only you see them, until you put them into a deck you publish. The extension uses no cookies and does not record the pages you visit; it keeps a linking key in the browser, which the browser's producer may sync through your account. You can delete every saved word from the website, revoke the key from the "Extension" page, or uninstall the extension. Avoid selecting text that contains other people's data or sensitive data.

Premium is optional and is bought on Google Play, which handles payment and billing. The subscription renews automatically each period until you cancel it in Google Play, which you can do at any time: Premium stays active until the end of the period already paid and your content remains readable, with the free plan's limits applying to anything new.

For refunds and purchase support you can contact Google Play or write to support.karuta@gmail.com. Any right of withdrawal applies according to the law of your country and the store's terms.

Karuta does not integrate AI models to generate content in the app or on the website. The "Prepare a prompt" function only builds a text and copies it to your clipboard: if you paste it into an external service, that service processes it under its own terms and is the controller; Karuta receives no copy.

For reading words aloud Karuta uses the speech engine of your device or browser, which, depending on its producer, may process the voice over the network. Some photographic images on the website were created with AI tools: they are not real photographs and show no people. No user data was used to create them.

Account, sync, community, saved words and subscription status: performance of a contract, meaning the service you asked for (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). Push notifications: your consent, given by enabling them and withdrawable at any time in the settings. Crash reports, moderation, security and technical website logs: legitimate interest in keeping the service stable and secure (Art. 6(1)(f)), with data minimised; you can object by writing to support.karuta@gmail.com. Legal obligations and defence of rights: Art. 6(1)(c) and (f).

If this document changes in any substantial way, the date at the top changes with it and the change is flagged in the app. Earlier versions stay available on request.